2009/9/4 Ed W <lists@...>:
> Obviously plenty of other ways to solve this, but curious if there is a
> solution within the portage build process?

I don't know of any standard way. Portage uses 'useradd' to generate
the new user
and this command does _not_ support a ROOT. The only (non-standard) way to
add a new user is by directly writing to /etc/passwd, but I'm not sure
if this works
on all OSes supported by Gentoo.

Anyway, if you follow http://gentoo.mindzoo.de/index.cgi/wiki/Cross%20Install
you will find the command

find /var/db/pkg -name '*.ebuild' -exec grep -qF 'pkg_postinst()' {}
\; -exec ebuild {} postinst \;

which reruns all postinstall sections of your cross-compiled system on
the target
and thus also creates the users.

Have fun!

    Sven